


concupisces

by AuroraBlix, TheAceApples



Series: Fright-ish Night [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Fright Night (2011)
Genre: (to be clear: it's implied. not like. a plot-point.), Gen, Grindelwald is a pedophile in this, Modern AU, fright night AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 01:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8777080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraBlix/pseuds/AuroraBlix, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAceApples/pseuds/TheAceApples
Summary: For the kinkmeme prompt:After a new neighbor moved into the house next door, Credence discovers that he is an ancient vampire. "Percy is a terrible name for a vampire"





	

“Percy is a _terrible_ name for a vampire!” Credence laughs. He feels bad about laughing but can’t help it, because really. “I mean, _Graves_ —yeah, I kinda get that. Although, I can’t quite decide if it’s more clever or lame. Not gonna lie, I’m leaning towards clever, but _Percy_?”

Modesty isn’t nearly as amused and simply gazes at him steadily.

“I didn’t name him,” she mutters, crossing her arms and pouting. “I’m just reporting the _facts_.”

Credence glances around the empty house his sister had dragged him to investigate with her, the dusky light throwing strange shadows throughout the rooms. “Dess,” he sighs, scrubbing a hand through his hair, “you’re nine, okay? They _just_ started teaching you what a fact is in school, and now you think our next-door neighbor being a vampire qualifies?”

She seems somewhat mollified by the nickname she’d chosen a few months ago in order to get away from the name Ma— _Mary Lou_ —had given her, but also continues looking mutinous. Credence thinks that maybe he shouldn’t have indulged her desire to go looking for the neighborhood’s possibly-missing, probably-a-serial-killer Mr. Grindelwald. Then he remembers what Miss Goldstein had told him and Chastity about making sure to listen to their little sister and give her the support and attention that Mary Lou never afforded any of them. So, no, it was a good thing he’d decided to indulge this little escapade, and now it needed to come to a close.

Sighing again, Credence gets down on one knee and meets his sister’s eyes. “Listen, Dess,” he begins, but doesn’t get any further as she darts away up the stairs. Credence makes a frustrated little noise and follows her, trying to stay quiet in the eerily-silent house even as Modesty makes enough noise for them both, plus a couple others.

He’s at the top of the stairs and looking around the hallway and into the open rooms, when he realizes that he doesn’t hear his sister anymore. “Dess,” Credence whispers, but she doesn’t answer. Then, in more of a hiss than a whisper, _“Modesty!”_

“He’s not here.”

Credence jumps about a foot in the air and spins around.

Modesty is standing in the doorway to a Spartan-looking bedroom.

The way she stands there, not moving so much as a muscle, and the flatness of her voice when she spoke, set off alarm bells in Credence’s head. He takes a few long strides over to the doorway and peers into the room. He thinks for a moment that his baby sister has mistaken the sparse decoration for genuine abandonment… and then he sees what she’s staring at.

On the wall above the bed is a corkboard, like the ones you see on TV that investigators pin papers and photographs to and then connect them with different-colored strings. It’s obviously been hastily deconstructed—thumb-tacks still pushed all the way into the soft material and little scraps of paper remaining where the adornments have obviously been ripped away in a hurry—but even the odd placement of the board isn’t what’s caught Modesty’s attention. 

Laying on the floor, apparently having escaped the hurried removal of its fellows, is a single photograph.

It’s of Modesty playing in the front yard of their house.

Several things stand out about the photo that has Credence taking very deliberate, even breaths: the way it’s obviously been taken with a long-focus lens, the way Modesty is completely unaware that she’s being photographed, the way the photo shows her with one foot off the ground and the hem of her dress is up past her knees like she was in the middle of jumping when it was taken.

Credence can't breathe.

He tries to swallow but his throat is stuck.

He tries to tear his eyes away from the blown-up image but they remain fixed.

He tries to reach forward and tug Modesty back when she moves to pick up the offending photo but—

With an ominous creak and groan, the floor between the two Amares cracks and a dark gap of several inches is created between Modesty Amare and the photo, the corkboard, the bed, and all the horrible, disgusting implications.

Modesty stays frozen where she is for a long, tense minute before she turns to look at Credence.

For Credence’s part, he merely stares dumbstruck at where the floor had broken and desperately tries to regain some semblance of calm.

They never should have come here. He never should have listened to his dearest baby sister when she said she wanted to check in on the neighborhood hermit that had given her nightmares on more than one occasion. He never should have followed her when she’d just opened the unlocked door and rushed in. He should have just told Chastity that their troubled little sister was worried about the creep down the street and let her handle it and _they never should have come here._

Credence takes a deep breath, shockingly loud in the thick silence of the house. Then he reaches forward, takes hold of the crook of Modesty’s elbow, and carefully tugs her away from the offending scrap of paper. With deliberate slowness, he once again takes a knee and gazes into his sister’s face—she looks unnaturally pale in rapidly descending darkness of night and her pale blue eyes have a worrying sheen to them.

“Dess,” he says carefully, “our neighbor is not a vampire.”

Modesty frowns and opens her mouth to protest.

“No, no, listen.” Credence sighs heavily and keeps his eyes from straying back toward the photo. “The man who lived here? _He’s_ a monster. Not the kind that M— _Mary Lou_ always ranted about, the kind that steals people’s souls and leads them down the path of _sin_ ”—he widens his eyes and throws his hands up dramatically, drawing a laugh from his sister—“but the regular human kind, okay?”

Modesty nods her understanding. She moves to turn her head, as if to look back at the picture, but Credence gently cups her cheek to keep her looking at him.

“We have enough monsters in our lives, Dess,” he says, fixing her with a significant look. “We don’t need to go looking for more. Especially, and I’m sorry to say it, but especially when it comes to crap like vampires, okay? They’re not real, none of the—the _vitriol_ that Mary Lou spewed is _real_ , okay?”

At this would-be assurance, Modesty gives her big brother a flat stare and spins around before he can stop her. She gives first the gap in the floor and then himself a very pointed look, raising her eyebrows in a way that Credence doubts a nine-year-old girl should be able (or maybe just allowed) to do.

Credence sighs again.

He’s been doing that a lot lately, ever since the Great Move of the Amare Family.

“Yeah,” he concedes, “some of the… stuff that happens around us is pretty… inexplicable. But that doesn’t mean that everything inexplicable that happens around us has to do with Mary Lou’s nonsense, alright?”

Modesty says nothing.

 _“Alright?”_ he repeats sharply.

With obviously great reluctance, Modesty nods.

Credence feels nothing but relief at the concession and also knows that she’ll only let it go for a short time before bringing it back up. But at least he’ll have the chance to talk… _everything_ over with Chastity before the subject reemerges.

“Okay,” he says with his own nod. “Now, do you think we could get out of here? It’s getting cold and I don’t want the cops to catch us breaking and entering.”

They leave the abandoned house quickly and turn in the direction of home.

Out of the corner of his eye, Credence spots a figure, slightly darker than the rest of the near-pitch-blackness of the night. He doesn’t look at it and focuses on getting Modesty home. He and Chastity, without the input of their little sister, had both agreed that nothing good could come from looking too closely at the world Mary Lou had feared so deeply.

And that included their new neighbor.

**Author's Note:**

> No idea if I'll be continuing this so a couple explanations:
> 
> 1) Chastity, Credence, and Modesty were all adopted by Mary Lou, a religious nut who believed that magic and magical creatures existed just like in the movie. Just like in the movie (or at least what's implied in the movie), she specifically adopted children of people she suspected of being magic-users. After years under her iron-fisted rule, Credence, Chastity, and Modesty got the fuck away from Mary Lou, changed their last names to "Amare", (Latin for "to love" or "to cherish", which they found delightfully ironic,) and moved to Las Vegas.
> 
> 2) Credence is still something like an Obscurial, Modesty and Chastity are untrained witches who do their best to control their magic without squashing it down, and they only have a vague understanding of the magical (or whatever) world but do their best.
> 
> 3) Tina is a child therapist that Credence and Chastity have Modesty visit, since they don't really know a healthy way to raise a kid, but know that it's certainly not the way Mary Lou does it.


End file.
